EU Biodiversity Targets 2030 must be balanced, realistic and feasible – 5 policy recommendations from EU state forests

Prior to the announcement of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, the European State Forests highlights 5 policy recommendations to make the Strategy’s targets for 2030 realistic and feasible.

1. Conservation targets should be supported by a solid assessment of the current biodiversity status and trends in the EU;
2. Restoration commitment requires properly defined objectives;
3. Clarifying the concepts of “primary” forests and “old-growth” forests;
4. New targets need to be realistic, feasible and fairly distributed among various ecosystem types and land uses;
5. Strengthening Sustainable Forest Management – a feasible way forward.

The EU Biodiversity Strategy aims to halt the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the EU and to help stop global biodiversity loss, reflecting the commitments taken by the EU within the international Convention on Biological Diversity. A well-designed EU biodiversity Strategy could play a major role in upscaling good European experiences to a global level. However, the EU conservation targets should be reliable and achievable and, thus, not overburden forest managers. This position paper analyzes the potential consequences of the announced Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 on forest management, in particular in European state forests.

EUSTAFOR believes that the forest-related targets outlined in the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 must be both meaningful and feasible. Thus, EUSTAFOR welcomes the prioritizing of afforestation as a means to increase EU forest cover and thus support the objectives of the EU Green Deal and green recovery plan.

While developing forestry-related objectives, active roles should be ensured by Member States, in line with the subsidiarity principle, as well as by forest owners and managers and all other relevant actors.

Read EUSTAFOR’s new position paper here.